CodeIgniter provides a simple framework that allows you to quickly get an application up and running.  The learning curve (so far) has been very low.  I like web-frameworks for projects. I have done a number of projects in Ruby on Rails, and I have dabbled in Django. Those have been pleasant experiences, but I prefer PHP as my preferred development language for most projects due to a number of reasons (not interested in jumping into that holy war right now.)

Up to this point, if I wanted to use a PHP framework, my choices were Zend and CakePHP. Zend is a monster. I’m sorry, I know a lot of developers swear by Zend, but I’m not one of them. Nobody “quickly” picks up Zend. Zend is so incredibly dense/bloated/abstracted that debugging something becomes an exercise that is more time consuming than the original problem that you were trying to solve. CakePHP felt too much like I was pretending to be Ruby on Rails, and there were so many hoops to jump through. And it was frequently a little “too magical.”

After exploring these different options, I wrote my own framework that took the parts of Ruby on Rails that I enjoyed, but kept the flexibility and familiarity of PHP. I have been using this for over a year now and it has served me well. I was pleased to find that the structure of CodeIgniter was almost identical to the structure of my own framework. This has made it a very easy switch for me.

The only problem that I have run into so far was briefly not understanding how to get to a GET parameter in a fashion that didn’t make me feel dirty.

Tangent about accessing GET parameters coming…
CodeIgniter obscures the $_GET parameters by default, you can enable them within your configuration, but I am working on one page of an existing site as a favor for a friend.  The CodeIgniter documentation suggests that you retrieve the parameters based on “segments” so if you wanted to pass in

http://www.mysite.com/events.php?start=25&state=VA&count=50

CodeIgniter suggests that you would generate the url

http://www.mysite.com/events/index/25/VA/50

And then retrieve your parameters based on which “segment” they were.

segment(3) => 25 // the 'start' value
segment(4) => VA // the 'state' value
segment(5) => 50 // the 'count' value

This makes me cringe for many reasons. What if, for example, the user can click a link to change the count to 25, but it defaults to 50. Most of the time this isn’t going to happen, so would I ALWAYS assume that I’m passing in the first segment as the start param, even when it’s typically not going to be used?

uri_to_assoc to the rescue
The solution to this “issue” (it’s more of my own issue than an actual problem) was the function uri_to_assoc.
Using uri_to_assoc means that I could format my urls as:

http://www.mysite.com/events/index/start/25/state/VA/count/50

and then in my code use:

$params = $this->uri->uri_to_assoc(3);

/* I now have the array $params with:
* $params['state'] = 'VA'
* $params['state'] = 25
* $params['count'] = 50
*/

This makes me much more comfortable, as it means that it doesn’t matter where in the URI that my parameters are positioned.
Tangent finished
I plan to continue using CodeIgniter for a while, to see if it’s the right fit. I have some small projects that it would likely be quite appropriate for, and it will get me out of the business of supporting my own framework.

I am experimenting with the django web-framework for a few projects at work.  I do the majority of my work in PHP or Java, but occasionally I like to play with Ruby on Rails, and decided that django deserved to have a look as well.

The first step in this process is to get django and the various components installed.

• Python
• EasyTools
• MySql
• MySqlDB
• Django

Python – I do my development from a relatively new Macbook Pro, and as such, Python 2.6.1 is already installed.  This is confirmed by typing ‘python’ from a terminal window.

> python

Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jul  7 2009, 23:51:51)

[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin

Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.

>>> ^D

EasyTools – Download the OS X of setup tools from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools#files, then run the .egg file as if it were an executable:

sh setuptools-0.6c9-py2.4.egg

MySql - I use MAMP (http://www.mamp.info) for my local PHP development (not sure how anybody could live without MAMP running locally.) MAMP provides a drop-in MySQL installation that I use for all of my local development purposes.  The one caveat to this is that it is not uncommon to run into scenarios where something is looking for a mysql_* executable that isn’t being found in the default location.

I previously was using MAMP for these installations, but found that at times, header files were needed for other installations, and MAMP isn’t really intended for this type of usage.  I still think MAMP is a great tool, but in this case, I needed to Install Mysql from source.

Next, add the path to the mysql_* executables to your PATH.

> export PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH

MySqlDB – In order for python/django to be able to talk with MySQL, the MySQL DB driver needs to be installed.  This is an area that caused me a little bit of delay, as the installation of MySQL-python 1.2.3c1 was complaining about my lack of gcc.  I encountered a few posts that described how to get around this limitation with earlier versions of MySQL-python, but given that I do a lot of development, it felt like the right thing to do would be to install the Mac OSX Developer Tools.

> curl -O http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.6/M/MySQL-python/MySQL_python-1.2.3c1-py2.6-linux-i686.egg
> sudo easy_install MySQL_python-1.2.3c1-py2.6-linux-i686.egg

If you receive errors about mysql, or gcc, then you need to re-visit your environment setup.

Django – Once these pieces were in place, installing the actual django source code was trivial.

> svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ django-trunk

Next, make sure that the Python interpreter can load Django’s code. There are various ways of accomplishing this. One of the most convenient, on Linux, Mac OSX or other Unix-like systems, is to use a symbolic link:

> ln -s `pwd`/django-trunk/django SITE-PACKAGES-DIR/django

Finding SITE-PACKAGES-DIR -
To find the location of the SITE-PACKAGES-DIR on your system, execute the following command from the command line:

> python -c “from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()”

Add Django commands to PATH – I find it helpful to add the django bin directory to my PATH environment variable so that I have convenient access to the framework’s various commands:

> export PATH=SITE-PACKAGES-DIR/django/bin:$PATH

Earn $$$ – Now that these pieces are in place, you can create your first django project by issuing the command:

> django-admin.py startproject mysite

Overall the installation was a snap, on par with a Ruby on Rails installation.  Over the next few weeks, I will start developing some simple django projects and write a post describing the experience.